Social Worker Killed in Kentucky: Tax Cuts And "Small Government" To Blame?

This is chilling story of the price that our society pays -- or more specifically that workers pay -- for listening to Republican ideologues like Grover Norquist who delight in the prospect of "Shrinking government to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Unfotunately, workers are drowning in that bathtub as well.

A social worker who had taken a 10-month-old boy to his mother's house for a visit was found beaten and stabbed to death, and the baby was apparently abducted, authorities said.

Police found the body of Boni Frederick, 67, at the house on Monday after she failed to return to work. Her car was missing.

Police searched on Tuesday for the missing boy, who was believed to be with his mother, Renee Terrell, 33, and her boyfriend.

The child had been taken from his mother when he was 13 days old because of neglect, police said.

"It's a dangerous job anytime you're taking someone's child away from their parents," Sgt. Dwight Duncan said. "You know how protective parents can be."

When people think about workplace violence, the automatically think of insane postal workers gunning down their co-workers and supervisors. But it was the Boni Fredericks of the world that haunted me throughout my years at AFSCME. The social workers, child support workers and others who had the difficult, unpleasant and dangerous job of enforcing our child protection laws against angry, and often mentally ill family members. They often had to venture into peoples' homes alone, into neighborhoods that even the police feared to enter with guns drawn. And all too often, they paid the ultimate price for doing society's dirty work.

Earlier this year, Sally Blackwell, a program director with Texas Child Protective Services, was found dead in a field. At the time, authorities would not say whether her death was related to her job, although she had received threats. In 2005, Marty Smith, a Washington State crisis responder for the state mental-health system, was killed checking on a schizophenic client whose mother had called to say he wasn't taking his medications.

Threats and violence against social service workers is nothing new, but it rarely rises into the headlines until someone gets killed. A recent study conducted by the National Association of Social Workers found that 55 percent of 5,000 licensed social workers surveyed said they faced safety issues on the job. Sixty-eight percent of them said their employers had not adequately addressed their concerns. A survey in 2002 of 800 workers found 19 percent had been victims of violence and 63 percent had been threatened.

In 1997, federal OSHA issued Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care Social Service Workers to assist health care and social service workers to prevent workplace violence. The guidelines established workplace violence as a legitimate hazard that employers had a responsibility to prevent, and provided specific examples of how to prevent such assaults -- like not working alone, better communication, background checks, etc -- but OSHA refuses to enforce its own recommendations.

And it's not like we haven't been warned. Kentucky social workers have been concerned for some time about their safety:

Social workers and other say Frederick’s death underscores the danger of the job where workers often are confronted by violent and angry adults as they seek to protect children.

“We knew it was only a matter of time,” Patricia Pregliasco, a social worker with the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said Tuesday. “We hoped and prayed this wasn’t going to happen.”

Social workers for the past year have been increasingly vocal about their growing caseloads and lack of adequate resources to do their jobs.

State officials are reorganizing the child welfare system to try to help but said they have no additional money for more workers and support staff.

“We’re concerned about our safety,” said Tricia Mack, also a social worker in Jefferson County. “We go out and there’s a lot of times clients make threats.”

Mack and Pregliasco said social workers often go alone to homes.

Family Court judges say their caseload of abused and neglected children is growing and the child welfare system simply doesn’t have resources to meet the needs.

“We’re hemorrhaging cases,’’ said Jefferson Family Court Judge Patricia Walker FitzGerald.

Dr. James J. Clark, a social work professor at the University of Kentucky, said that Kentucky – like most states – doesn’t have sufficient resources to handle the increasingly complex cases of child abuse and neglect.

“I think it’s pretty clear that child welfare is pretty under resourced everywhere in the United States,’’ he said. “It’s just not a priority area for a lot of state governments.”

As I wrote following the death of a California mental health worker in 2003, we need to look at the real root causes of these tragedies. When voters, whipped into an anti-tax frenzy by right-wing radio talk/T.V. show wingnuts, as well as politicians seeking to ride the their wave, refuse to see the need to maintain -- or even expand-- government revenues to pay for needed government services, you end up with more needy people getting fewer services from social service workers who don't have the support they need to provide people with the help they deserve, and don't even have the support they need to provide for their own safety.

The result of this breakdown in our ability to treat those who suffer from mental illness is not just a tragedy for them and their families, but for our society as well -- particularly for those members of our society who take on this nation's toughest and most dangerous jobs of providing us with security and providing assistance for people most in need of help -- in a system that refuses to provide the support that they need.

This collective unwillingness to pay for the social services that the people of this country need has ramifications throughout society -- especially for abused children, mental health patients and their families -- and especially for those members of our society who take on this nation's toughest and most dangerous jobs of providing assistance for people most in need of help. The question isn't whether or not we should have higher or lower taxes, or whether we need a big or small government, but who will pay for the things that society demands to make life in this country civilized and livable? We can hide our heads in the sand, but in the meantime, workers like Sally Blackwell, Marty Smith, Boni Frederick have paid for ideological fraud and society's blindness with their lives.

They deserved better.


Related Stories

• A Broken Mental Health System; A Dead Police Detective, May 6, 2006
• Case Worker's Death Spurs Safety Campaign in Washington, January 29, 2006
• Conducting The Public's Business -- And Dying For It, November 11, 2005
• Precautions Save the Life of Child Protective Services Worker, February 17, 2005
• Social Worker Killed In The Line Of Duty -- What's Being Done?, September 14, 2004
• Workplace Violence in Health Care on the Rise, April 26, 2004
• Workplace Violence: Fashionable vs. Unfashionable, January 18, 2004
• Who really killed Dr. Erlinda Ursua? December 2, 2003
  

Workplace Violence: What It Mostly Is, What It Mostly Isn't

About once a year, I need to go through the tedious process of straightening the world out about workplace violence. The current round was stimulated by this article, "Workplace violence can be predicted, experts say." The article goes on to note that "Nationally, more than 20,000 incidents of workplace violence are reported each year, ranging from verbal threats and unwanted sexual advances to pinching and pummeling."

But then it starts going off the deep end. After informing us that

the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that workplace violence is most likely to occur on Mondays, from 8 a.m. until noon. And violent employees are most frequently men aged 35 to 44 who have been with their employer for one to five years,

the article then drags out its main example to illustrate that workplace violence can be prevented: Edgewater Technology Inc. in Wakefield, Mass., where a 42-year-old computer software tester shot and killed seven coworkers in 2000. According to the facility manager, in retrospect, there were numerous warning signs of a "troubled employee," including mood swings, changes in appearance, a messy divorce, a previous workers comp complaint for stress, fascination with weapons and explosives and a diagnosis of schizophernia.

Luckily, in these post 9/11 days, there's solutions at hand:

Matthew Cabral, an inspector for the federal protective service for the Department of Homeland Security, said that since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, companies and government offices have increased security with metal detectors, bulletproof glass and concrete barriers that appear decorative, such as flowerpots, to prevent people from driving into buildings.

Now, all of this is well and fine. It's possible that if the employer were more attuned to this man's problems, and if they had a decent Employee Assistance Program, the incident might have been prevented.

But this whole anecdote misses the point about the problem of workplace violence in this country. Less than ten percent of workplace homicides result from what's known as "worker-on-worker" violence -- where a current or former employees comes into the workplace and shoots or stabs former co-workers or supervisors.

The vast majority of workplace violence consists of retail workers being attacked during robberies, taxi drivers being robbed, health care and social service workers being attacked by patients and clients, and security personnel (law enforcement or private security guards) being attacked by violent individuals.

Just as an example, take a look at the list below, most of which was pulled from the latest "Weekly Toll," a list of workers killed on the job over the past two weeks. Only one of these can be considered "worker-on-worker" violence.

ATTACKS ON FOREST SERVICE STAFF UP FIVEFOLD IN 2005
Builder security worker slain
Family Hopes $10K Reward Will Lead To Slain Worker's Killers
5 arrested in county worker's death
US agent among two dead in Florida prison gunfight
Cab Driver Found Dead In North Miami Beach Taxi
Hack's rare night shift proved deadly
Restaurant manager fatally shot in robbery
Pawn shop owner killed in Easley
Tattoo shop owner found dead
Liquor store clerk shot dead
Taxi Driver Found Dead Next To Cab
Gunman kills owner of store: This is fourth time in seven weeks a clerk in Modesto has been shot
Officer, Suspect Killed in Texas Standoff
Cordele store manager fatally stabbed
Security guard shot, killed near Victorville nightclub
Co-worker charged in fatal shooting
Pizza deliveryman, robbed and shot, dies of injuries
Video poker worker murdered
2 charged in slaying of parking attendant
Arrest made in death of liquor store owner

The premise of the article, however, is true: most of these incidents can be prevented. There are definite risk factors in retail establishments that can be addressed:

• Working with money.
• Working alone
• Working late nights
• Working in dangerous neighborhoods

In fact, in the late 1990's, OSHA published to workplace violence guidelines for health care workers and for late night retail workers, in addition to numerous fact sheets, and cites tons of literature describing steps employers can take to prevent workplace assaults. In addition, the state of New Mexico has issued a late night convenience store violence standard that requires convenience stores open between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. either to have two workers on duty, or one clerk and a security guard, or to install bulletproof glass or other safety features to limit access to store employees. The state of Washington enforces a "Late Night Retail Workers Crime Protection Act" which requires annual crime prevention training, drop-safes or limited access safes, and outside lighting.

Numerous labor unions and the American Public Health Association have called on OSHA to issue a workplace violence standard. Meanwhile, responding to the high level of threats and assaults against public employees, New YorkGovernor George Patacki signed a bill earlier this month calling for managers of government worksites where at least 20 permanent full-time employees work to assess the sites' potential for violence. That bill and two others have been a major focus of public employee union organizing.

The good news is that workplace homicides have been declining over the past few years, from 1080 in 1994 to 551 this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bad news is that workplace homicides generally track the overall crime rate, which rose sharply last year after a downward trend over the past decade. Judging from the number of homicides in the average Weekly Toll, the workplace number may be rising again too.

The problem with articles like this is that they take the attention away from where the problem really lies. But, as I've written before, it's much more tempting to focus on the mentally unstable worker -- often postal workers -- who would come into work armed to the teeth and blow away their bosses and a few co-workers for good measure. These were fashionable because, unlike the unfashionable crowed, they got lots of press and provided fodder for armies of consultants who would scare employers into paying large sums for how to screen job applicants (or current employees) who might turn violent.

The bottom line is that any workplace violence policy should focus on the real risks of violence. While employers should be trained to deal with potentially unstable workers, it does little good to start profiling workers in a futile attempt to predict when one may go over the edge, while in the real workplace, workers are actually getting attacked by criminals and clients.

Related Stories

• "Taking your life into your own hands just to get the job done:" Missouri Mental Health Institutions, June 22, 2006
• A Broken Mental Health System; A Dead Police Detective, May 12, 2006
• Workplace Fatalities That OSHA Ignores, October 1, 2005
• Workplace Shootings: Crazy Workers or Crazy Workplaces?, May 29, 2005
• APHA Calls for OSHA Workplace Violence Standard, January 6, 2005
• What's Henshaw Got Against A Little Violence?, November 15, 2004
• Workplace Violence: Fashionable vs. Unfashionable, January 18, 2004
• Who really killed Dr. Erlinda Ursua?, December 2, 2003

Killing Of Texas Social Service Worker Raises Workplace Safety Issues

The killing of Texas social worker Sally Blackwell, 53, is bringing attention to the hazards faced by social service workers. Blackwell, a program director with Texas Child Protective Services, was found dead in a field. The authorities have not said whether her death was related to her job, although she had received threats.

Threats and violence against social service workers is nothing new, but it rarely rises into the headlines until someone gets killed.

A study released last week by the National Association of Social Workers found that 55 percent of 5,000 licensed social workers surveyed said they faced safety issues on the job. Sixty-eight percent of them said their employers had not adequately addressed their concerns. A survey in 2002 of 800 workers found 19 percent had been victims of violence and 63 percent had been threatened.

In 1997, federal OSHA issued guidelines to assist health care and social service workers to prevent workplace violence, but Texas isn't exactly at the forefront of protecting public employees:

Currently, social workers in Texas receive a half day of safety training, and the issue frequently comes up in a 12-week course, said a spokesman, Chris Van Deusen.

The child services department has no way of tracking how many threats its roughly 3,000 caseworkers receive, said Patrick Crimmins, spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services. But even people who have spent their entire careers with the agency can remember only a few instances in which threats escalated to violence, Mr. Crimmins said.

Texas social worker Holly Jones stressed that "We don't have weapons, we don't have training in self-defense, we didn't go through a police academy and we're dealing with the same people they are."

After Marty Smith, a crisis responder for the Washington State mental-health system, was beaten to death last November while attempting to hospitalize a schizophrenic client who had not been taking his medication, Smith's union, SEIU 1199NW, began organizing to pass Marty's Law: Make Our Work Safer. (HB 2921). Marty's Law would provide funding so clinicians can work in pairs when they are sent to evaluate a client in a private residence. The bill also requires clinicians to be provided with cell phones, prompt access to patient records, and training on violence prevention.

In addition,

In 2001, Michigan lawmakers toughened the penalties for people who threaten or attack social workers after a child welfare caseworker was beaten, bound, gagged and suffocated while checking on a family. The law also required safety training for workers who make home visits.

The death of a Kansas mental health social worker prompted Representative Dennis Moore, Democrat of Kansas, to introduce a resolution last fall that would encourage state and local agencies to improve the safety of social workers. The resolution is pending.

Hey, I have another idea. Being as workplace violence is a serious workplace safety problem across the United States, and there are feasible ways to prevent attacks, maybe a federal government agency responsible for workplace safety should issue an enforceable standard.

Related Stories

• Case Worker's Death Spurs Safety Campaign in Washington, January 29, 2006
• Conducting The Public's Business -- And Dying For It, November 11, 2005
• Precautions Save the Life of Child Protective Services Worker, February 17, 2005
• Social Worker Killed In The Line Of Duty -- What's Being Done?, September 14, 2004
• Workplace Violence in Health Care on the Rise, April 26, 2004

Case Worker's Death Spurs Safety Campaign in Washington

Last November, Marty Smith, a crisis responder for the Washington State mental-health system, was beaten to death while attempting to hospitalize a schizophrenic client who had not been taking his medication. Smith was working alone that night, a common practice among mental health and social service workers.

Now Smith's union, SEIU 1199NW, is organizing to pass Marty's Law: Make Our Work Safer. (HB 2921) Marty's Law would provide funding so clinicians can work in pairs when they are sent to evaluate a client in a private residence. The bill also requires clinicians to be provided with cell phones, prompt access to patient records, and training on violence prevention.

Marty's law is part of the Campaign for Quality Mental Health Care. A poll conducted by SEIU followign Marty Smith's death found that Washington state’s mental health system has failed to provide a safe working environment, sufficient training, or enough support to its workers.

• In the last two years, caseloads and the complexity of individual client conditions have increased.
• 75% of community mental health workers report feeling unsafe on the job.
• 78% of community mental health workers have been assaulted either verbally, physically or both; fully 22% report
• being physically assaulted in the last two years.
• 42% of community mental health workers feel they don’t have adequate backup when safety is threatened.
• 44% of community mental health workers feel they don’t have sufficient training to deal with safety issues.

Doing Society's Dirty (and Dangerous) Work

I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about workers who get killed in trench collapses, falls off buildings and chemical plant explosions.

Lost in the "drama" of these fatalities are the hazards that Public employees do some of the most unpleasant, but necessary jobs that the citizens of this country demand to live the life they've become accustomed to. And they face hazards that most of us don't want to think about.

And for all that they get lousy pay.

Take social workers, for example:

Social work can be a risky business.

In February, an angry mother in Woburn slammed a door into a social worker's face during a home visit. In April, a Fitchburg woman threw a potted plant at a social worker's head. In July, a social worker in Lowell was almost run down by a pickup driven by a disgruntled former client.

And overshadowing all of these recent reports is the slaying of Linda Silva, a Department of Social Services worker who was murdered in 1996 by a father who had lost custody of his children.

State social workers say these examples show the potential dangers they face every day, and because of those hazards, they deserve better retirement benefits.

SEIU Local 509 which represents Department of Social Services workers in Massachusetts is pushing for a bill that put them into a higher-paying category of the state retirement system along with employees that include mental health hospital attendants, county elevator maintenance men, municipal electricians, juvenile probation officers, some correction officers, and court officers. The change would allow them to retire a few years earlier and receive a higher pension.

Summer Twyman was the social worker who had a door slammed on her face in February. She was out of work for months. Her injuries included a concussion and nerve damage. While she was out of work, she used up her sick time and received less pay. She also had to cover some medical expenses.

Twyman, 24, returned to her job at the DSS office in Cambridge in June, while following up with physicians and her neurologist.

"I've been out to many homes with police officers during removals. It's because of those situations [police and probation officers] get those benefits . . . we are in those same homes," she said.

"We should get equal benefits," Twyman said.

Meanwhile, let's look at probation officers in Los Angeles who staged a sick-out to protest dangerous working conditions, inadequate staffing and compensation that falls short of what other counties pay.

Some at the demonstration said they had been attacked while transporting repeat juvenile offenders. Others said they had been shot at — while armed only with pepper spray and a cellphone — while trying to visit probationers.

"They want us to go out and do proactive probation work, but they don't want to compensate us properly for the risks we're taking," said Aldin Tatley, who works with a unit of armed probation officers that checks on violent gang members in Lancaster, Palmdale and Altadena. "I have two kids. I want to go home at night."

AFSCME Local 685, which represents 400 Los Angeles County probation officers, has been negotiating a new contract with the county for three years. Almost 1000 called in sick Tuesday and 500 showed up for a rally to demand that the county return to the bargaining table.

Aside from poorly paying dangerous jobs, you may have noticed one advantage these workers have that most American workers don't have: unions. That means the ability to lobby for legislation, to stage collective work actions and stage demonstrations that build attention and support for their issues.

It's a lesson that more workers in this country should be paying attention to.

Precautions Save the Life of Child Protective Services Worker

When I was at AFSCME, one of the jobs highest on my list of public employee "jobs-I'd-never-want-to-have" was child protective services worker. These are the people whose job it is to investigate some of the most pathetic, sickening cases of child abuse you'd never want to think about, and often have to take children away from parents who were abusive, mentally ill, or just plain unable to cope with the lives they had been dealt.

Needless to say, parents weren't always appreciative of the efforts of these workers, and it was all-too-common for child protective service workers to be threatened or attacked. Sometimes even their families were threatened. But back in the 1980's and early 1990's it was generally extremely difficult to convince their management that they needed to travel in pairs, and sometimes to be accompanied by an armed law enforcement official.

The issuance of OSHA's Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care Social Service Workers issued in 1997 established workplace violence as a legitimate hazard that employers had a responsibility to prevent, and provided specific examples of how to prevent such assaults.

That history apparently paid off yesterday in Washington State:

A machete-wielding father was fatally shot yesterday after he attacked a veteran Child Protective Services (CPS) worker in the worst-known case of on-the-job violence at the state child-welfare agency.

The CPS worker, accompanied by a co-worker and a Ferry County sheriff's deputy, was investigating a complaint that three children were living in a home near Curlew without running water or electricity when she was attacked by the children's father, State Patrol trooper Jim Hays said.

Bryan S. Russell, 35, pummeled one of the social workers with a machete and a 2-by-4 as she lay on the ground before the sheriff's deputy shot and killed him, Hays said.

The worker, whose name was not released, suffered cuts, a broken arm and wrist and a possible skull fracture. She was admitted to Deaconess Medical Center in Spokane for a CAT scan.

"It appears it (the shooting) saved this worker's life," Hays said.

The attack chilled social workers across the state. State policy prohibits the 2,000-person child-welfare staff from carrying pepper spray or guns but encourages workers to bring along a co-worker or call police when their work puts them in potential jeopardy. The agency does require workers to bring an officer along if they're going to take a child into state custody, and it's common in rural Washington to have an officer on hand during a CPS investigation.

The assaults and the threats of not uncommon.

Current and former CPS staff say the attack is the most serious in memory, although investigators say death threats are routine and less-serious assaults happen sporadically.

A survey of several hundred Montana child-welfare workers, published in 1994 in the journal Child Welfare, found that one in 10 had been hit on the job in the preceding year, and a third of the workers had faced death threats. A quarter of the surveyed workers feared their own families could face job-related violence.

Wilson, the retired CPS administrator, said his own survey of staff in southwest Washington found many suffered insomnia, anxiety and stress-related stomach pain. "Well over half had been threatened - their lives or their family," he said.

And the damage is not just physical. Social service and child protective service workers suffer the typical symptoms of severe stress, suffering insomnia, anxiety and stress-related stomach pain.

Unfortunately, despite the frequency of assaults and threats, budget cuts threaten to undermine worker safety:

At most of CPS's state offices, staff members work behind locked doors, and some have security guards. But Seattle's King West office on lower Queen Anne recently lost its security guards in a budget cut, worrying some staff, said John Birnel, a union shop steward and social worker.

"It gives people in child-protection, where the situations are a lot more dicey, a pause for concern," he said.

Related Stories

Doctor Killed by Mental Patient 11/25/2003

Who really killed Dr. Erlinda Ursua? December 2, 2003

Social Worker Killed In The Line Of Duty -- What's Being Done?

UPDATE: For more information on the October 17, 2006 killing of Kentucky social worker Boni Frederick, go to this article.

********************

You may have noticed in the last Weekly Toll the death of social worker Teri Zenner, who was stabbed to death while visiting a 17-year-old client at his home. Zenner's husband, Max, has turned his grief into action...

by fighting for more protection for social workers.

He wants them equipped with pagers that can call 911 and have global-positioning satellite capabilities. He wants to ensure case workers have clients' criminal records, and he wants to see mental health facilities reopened so there's adequate room for patients who should be hospitalized.

During my decade and a half as health and safety director for AFSCME, Zenner's story was all too familiar. Social service workers were the main victims of workplace violence long before the Post Office incidents of the 1990's brought the issue to everyone's attention. After a number of tragic deaths in the 1980's and 1990's, AFSCME, SEIU, AFT and a number of other unions convinced OSHA to issue guidelines to protect health care and social service workers against workplace violence which called for many of the measures that Zenner is calling for. CalOSHA had issued its own guidelines even earlier. OSHA later issued guidelines for late night retail workers and a fact sheet for taxi drivers.

Max Zenner puts his finger on some of the root causes:

Zenner thinks part of the problem is a lack of available beds for mental health patients who need hospitalization. Wiebe estimates Kansas has about 350 beds available, down from around 5,000 in the 1950s.

Wiebe said that Teri Zenner followed all protocol in her visit to Ellmaker and that there was nothing to indicate potential violence. The defendant has a prior conviction for carrying a concealed knife, though the Johnson County Mental Health Center does not routinely get background checks of patients.

There is no doubt that the deinstitutionalization wave of the 1980's led to more potentially violent patients on the streets with less oversight and attention, increasing the danger for overworked social workers who work with clients in much less structured adn protected settings.

For a while, during the 1990's, federal OSHA even used the General Duty Clause to cite several mental institutions and hospitals for not taking measures to protect employees against workplace violence. Federal OSHA no longer cites, and rarely even investigates workplace violence incidents. Some union activists have been considering petitioning OSHA for a standard.

That wouldn't have helped Zenner, however. She had the misfortune of being a public employee in the state of Kansas where public employees have no OSHA protection.

There's much more information on workplace violence on OSHA's Website. Check out ASFCME's guide to Preventing Workplace Violence.


Related Stories

• Case Worker's Death Spurs Safety Campaign in Washington, January 29, 2006
• Conducting The Public's Business -- And Dying For It, November 11, 2005
• Precautions Save the Life of Child Protective Services Worker, February 17, 2005
• Workplace Violence in Health Care on the Rise, April 26, 2004

NY Public Employees Call for Workplace Violence Standard

Responding to a continuing rise in the rate of workplace violence in New York, public employee unions are calling on the state Hazard Abatement Board to issue a standard protecting workers against workplace violence. According to the Public Employees Federation,

The number of assaults on state employees has risen from 1,396 in 1999 to 1,710 in 2001. And the rate of assaults and injuries per 10,000 state employees rose to 83.5 in 2001, a 26 percent increase over the 1999 rate.

When you factor in direct and indirect employment costs, workplace violence costs the state an estimated $42.5 million annually.

Thanks to joint efforts with PEF, injury statistics for the state Office of Mental Health have improved, but still show an extremely high statewide accident rate of 25.1 accidents per 100 workers in 2001-02. This rate is doubled to 51.1 when only forensic facilities are considered.